He Waited
by Flatlander Jr
Summary: Thirteenth Doctor. He never thought his last moments would be on Earth, and that humans would be responsible.


HE WAITED

DANIELLE FRANCES DUCREST

Disclaimer: _Doctor Who_ belongs to the BBC. _Highlander: The Series_ belongs to Davis/Panzer Productions and Gaumont Télévision. Any copyright infringements are not intended. This story was written for entertainment and not for profit.

Spoilers and Timing: Spoilers are for the _Doctor Who _episodes "The Impossible Planet" and "The Satan Pit."

Author's Note: The point of this fic wasn't to get the medical facts correct. I'm sure I got a ton of things wrong in that regard. If you notice anything extremely wrong or even slightly wrong, please let me know, because correcting the mistake would only improve the story.

Author's Note #2: I'm not happy with the title of this story, but I'm not sure what else to call it.

Summary: _Highlander/Doctor Who_. He never thought his last moments would be on Earth and that humans would be responsible.

-----

Smoke stung his eyes, thick smoke that was at first green, then blue, then red, then purple, though that had more to do with the fact that all the colors in the room had bled together until he couldn't tell which one was which. It didn't really matter, anyway, because what was the point in using colors to distinguish one blurred image from the next? They were all just blobs and blob-like things and blobby-ish blob-like blobby blurs.

He tried to blink, or at least he was pretty sure he did, but his vision didn't clear. Most of his twenty-seven senses had either gone numb or were screaming warnings in his mind, informing him in no uncertain terms that things had gone very, very wrong for him and wouldn't be getting any better anytime soon. He knew he should listen to these, and he knew he should be very concerned, though he wasn't sure why.

His brain pounded in his head, banging against the sides of his skull in time to the beating of his hearts. Thump-thump……thump-thump…… That was odd. He was pretty sure his hearts shouldn't be beating that slowly…

A light flashed in his eyes, a tiny artificial kind from a console nearby. Yes, console, that was the word…he was on a ship, lying on the floor surrounded by rubble. Not the TARDIS, though…if it were the TARDIS, he was certain the ceiling wouldn't be decorated in such an unattractive foil-like material…unless the old girl had decided to do some redecorating, and he really shouldn't put it past her, seeing as how the time ship tended to do whatever she pleased, never mind the amount of care and attention he put into her, he'd think his ship would show some gratitude every now and then…

He blinked, and the colorful blobs wavered like a mirage in a desert. But that was odd, because he wasn't in a desert, he was on a ship…which had crashed onto the surface of Earth eight minutes ago.

That would explain what so much smoke was doing onboard. It would also go a long way toward explaining why he was lying down, looking up at the shiny ceiling. In fact, his side felt a little sticky. He must have been bleeding, and severely, too, and that was the weirdest thing of all. He was so good at avoiding getting even a scratch on his adventures that he'd begun to believe he was as invincible as he'd made himself out to be. He never got hurt, ever. It wasn't logical that he could be hurt now.

Everything refused to make sense, which was confusing, because everything always made sense, or they made some attempt to explain themselves so that, even though it still didn't make any sense, at least some effort was made to make it more sensible, whatever it was…what was he thinking?

He was so dizzy. If he could only close his eyes, everything would make sense again. He used to be able to think his way out of any situation. Just yesterday, in fact, he'd been exceptionally good at it. If he closed his eyes, everything would be fine…

-----

"Doctor. Doctor, please, come on, just wake up."

The voice was young, a male's, but something half-remembered told him that the male in question wasn't young. The Doctor opened his eyes.

Blurs solidified, becoming a smooth, dull ceiling that didn't have any foil-like features about it. He must have been really out of it to think it had. Though the room was littered with debris, the outer hull of the ship seemed to be intact or the ceiling would have caved in.

A deceptively young face, belonging to someone he was sure he knew, looked down at him.

He wasn't dead. That was something of a relief. He wondered if he'd be looking into a different face the next time he came across a mirror. Then the pain came, and he realized that he was still in a good deal of trouble because he hadn't regenerated yet.

He groaned, and that syllable sent another wave of pain through him.

"Hang in there, old man," his friend said.

His friend was Richard Ryan. Yes, that was right. A hundred other names sprang to mind, all of them associated with the other man, but the Doctor was certain that Richard Ryan was his true name, the name Richard called himself when no one was around to hear. Eighteen hundred years old, a thousand years the Doctor's junior. Immortal, in every sense of the word except one. Resident of the Earth, its territories and occasionally the TARDIS since the Gregorian Calendar year 1974. The Doctor's brain supplied the facts as if skimming a bullet list.

A nervous smile graced Richard's unalterably young face. A streak of red blood matted some of his blonde curls. Grayish-blue eyes wandered nervously between the Doctor's eyes to elsewhere on the Doctor's body, probably to the wound in his side.

"What-" The Doctor coughed and tried again. "What happened?" He could remember Richard's life history, but recent events were still hazy.

Richard's smile widened from relief. "We crashed. Conglomerate Patrol shot us down right before that virus you made short-circuited all of their systems. It'll be a while before they can come get us. You've got time."

Time. Lord of Time. Sometimes, he'd wondered if that had made him a god. Guess he was wrong about that, because the only time he had now was time to die. Until he regenerated, that was. It seemed to be taking longer than usual. He was fairly certain that gods weren't supposed to be able to die. Well, he knew he'd never been a god, anyway. Ridiculous to even entertain the thought.

Bits of what had happened came back to him. He remembered sitting in the living room of a house with Richard and Amanda, laughing over something or other, when the door had disintegrated. Patrolmen, dressed in gray bodysuits and black helmets, had charged in and surrounded them. He'd never been very good at staying under the radar, and he supposed it had been only a matter of time before the wrong people find out about him and went after him and his friends. That didn't mean it hadn't come as a shock.

He could remember being suspended in mid-air, naked and screaming. Men and women, all undeniably human, stared at him, mouths in thin lines and eyes narrowed against seeing the pain they were causing. They ignored his questions about where they'd taken his friends. They wouldn't tell him they planned to do with him.

"We're on Earth…thirty-ninth century," the Doctor said. He sounded so weak. He supposed he was. That was new, as well. This latest incarnation was so full of life, though not nearly as…bouyant as his tenth body or his fourth. Never show weakness. That had been his motto for so long. It was strange to show weakness now and not really care that he was doing it.

He wasn't just wounded in his side. The Unified Conglomerate of Nations had tortured-no, experimented-on him, physically and psychically…it was no wonder his senses were in such disarray and his mind refused to settle on one topic for very long.

"That's right," Richard replied, smiling reassuringly.

"Amanda?" He tried to move his head to look for her, but a wave of dizziness made him close his eyes.

Richard looked over the Doctor's head at something the Doctor couldn't see. "She's fine. We're both fine. She's looking around for some bandages. The medical wing was pretty much destroyed, but there's a chance we'll find some-"

A spasm of pain washed over him, and the Doctor screamed. Richard grabbed his shoulder, the one that was undamaged, and held him steady, offering words of comfort and reassurance until the spasms stopped. The Doctor was left panting and even weaker than before.

He was pretty sure he'd lost a lot of blood. He wondered why he was still conscious. His sense of time, his though processes, his deductive skills-all of them had been rendered useless.

A crash came from behind him, followed by boots crunching over broken bits of spaceship. "Pressure bandages." Amanda thrust a package into Richard's hands and knelt down next to the Doctor. She appeared in his field of vision. Like Richard, she looked a sight. The faded orange dye in her hair, originally as bright as his own ginger hair, was almost completely gray from coatings of dust. Both Immortals were covered in dirt, grease, sweat and-

"You're bleeding," he said.

Blood flowed freely from a swallow cut on Amanda's arm. Any other injuries she'd sustained appeared to have healed, but not that one.

"It's nothing," she told him.

Indeed, it was nothing. The cut on her arm sealed itself as he watched. He'd seen the rapid healing processes of Immortals before, but it had never failed to amaze him. What an interesting study Immortal physiology had made, and the company had been superb, as well…

Her voice was rough. She coughed. Smoke was still floating in the air. There was no place for it to go.

She ripped open the packaging of a pressure bandage, pushed aside a torn portion of his shirt and slapped the bandage over a wound he hadn't realized was there. Now that he was aware of it, the wound throbbed.

"These are no good," said Richard. "The blood's just soaking through them. He needs a transfusion and some stitches."

"Using whose blood?" Amanda snapped. "And I'm fresh out of needles and thread, last time I looked."

The Doctor's gaze moved away from Amanda's arm. He caught sight of the look that passed between the Immortals. There was no reason to be so concerned, really. He'd regenerate any second now, and then they'd wish they hadn't wasted all of those bandages.

He opened his mouth to tell them this when another bit of memory sent shock through him. This was his thirteenth body. All he'd ever had were thirteen lives, and he'd used them up. He wouldn't be coming back from this. For a moment, he'd forgotten, and he'd started to hope.

This couldn't be it. There was so much more he wanted to do, so many things he hadn't seen, so many people and planets he had to save…

"Get an idea of where we are?" Richard asked.

Amanda shook her head. "There's too much smoke, and one of the other sections is on fire. I couldn't get any of the exits to open. It's like the doors are jammed. I think the ship lodged itself in the ground."

He made a face but nodded.

If they could get to the TARDIS, everything would be fine. They could use the equipment in the infirmary to fix him up as good as new, and all three of them would be safe from the Conglomerate. The Doctor reached out with his mind and searched for the familiar telepathic hum of his beloved machine, but it was no use. Whatever the Conglomerate had done to him had seriously screwed with his mental processes. He wouldn't have been able to sense the TARDIS even if he were standing in the console room.

"How far…" He took a deep breath and tried again. "How far away is the TARDIS?"

His companions exchanged another look, and he knew he'd said the wrong thing.

"What is it?" They didn't answer. "What's happened to the TARDIS?"

Richard sighed. "We can't go to the TARDIS, Doctor. She died two hundred years ago. Remember?"

The Doctor stared at him. "That's not possible."

"Doctor." His gaze shifted to Amanda. She gave him a sad smile. "She died of old age. There was nothing you could have done."

His beloved ship, gone. Why couldn't he remember? How had he lived for the past two hundred years without the TARDIS?

-----

When he opened his eyes again, something soft elevated his head off the floor. Richard's shirt was gone, exposing muscles that weren't nearly as developed as they had been weeks ago. Richard sat on the floor to his right, while Amanda was perched on the chair to his left. There were four chairs on the bridge, but this was the only one that hadn't been torn to shreds or covered by debris. The Doctor had been sitting in that chair, staring at a readout on the console screen in front of it, when the first shot from the patrol weapons fire had hit them. The view through the window, still intact, was of a wall of dirt.

He could think much more clearly now. The drugs were wearing off. He couldn't move much, but it would probably be a good idea to stay still, anyway. He didn't have much time left.

Amanda and Richard were talking. Neither of them had cleaned themselves up, though there probably weren't any towels or water lying about that they could use. Even through the filth, and Immortal endurance aside, he could tell that they were exhausted, physically and emotionally. Their clothes were torn, and blood matted the tears. Some of those cuts had been there when they'd escaped the laboratory, but the rest were likely sustained during the crash.

The patrolmen hadn't come looking for them, yet. His virus must have done more damage than he'd anticipated. At another time in his life, he wouldn't have stopped at a virus. He would have made absolute certainty that the UCN couldn't resume its experiments on sentient life forms in the future. A computer virus would have to be sufficient this time. He was so tired, anyway; there was no way he could have worked up the energy to rain down vengeance upon his aggressors.

What would be the point, anyway? He'd been pretty violent in his tenth life, but his eleventh regeneration had been one act of vengeance after another, or so it seemed in hindsight. He'd spent a good deal of time in all of his incarnations destroying governments and preventing them from doing further wrongs. There wasn't a planet in the galaxy-except for those precious few places where sentient lifeforms never settled-where he hadn't run for his life, been imprisoned, saved a single life or saved the whole world. He'd lost track of the number of times he'd saved the Earth and its various peoples, and all for what? To be dissected by its unified government in the thirty-ninth century? He'd expected better from his favorite alien planet. It had been a foolish hope, so foolish that he couldn't believe how idiotic he'd been for believing it.

Not everyone from this planet was like that, he knew. Two good examples were his companions, some of the oldest citizens of the Earth. They'd lived through a number of humanity's atrocities, sometimes as participants and other times as observers. Yet, despite all that, they'd refused to submit to the recurring fears shared by the general populace of the human race.

Some individuals on Earth were willing to experience new things with an open mind and learn from them. Those individuals had sustained his belief that humanity had the potential to be something better. It would seem, however, that the work of a few individuals wasn't enough to excuse the actions of an entire race.

It was true that the human race spread out across the stars and accomplished quite a deal over the millennia, but humanity's old habits always seemed to crop up every few centuries. Slavery would be abolished and outlawed at one point in Earth's history, only to become morally acceptable a few millennia later; the fact that the slaves were another race, the Ood, made it all right, as long as all humans were treated equally.

"Hello, Doctor." Amanda smiled at him.

He smiled back. He shifted, ignoring as best he could the pain the motion sent through him. "How long have I been lying here? Never mind. I know." His sense of time had straightened itself out. It had only been a matter of minutes.

"If I'm dead when the patrol comes…burn my body. Seal me in with the burning portion of the transport." He met both of their gazes. "I don't want them to get a hold of a Time Lord corpse."

They nodded. "We won't let them take you, Doc," Richard promised him.

Richard knew how much the he hated that nickname, but he didn't correct the Immortal this time. Doc, Doctor…Richard had liked to go by Richie, once upon a time. There had also been a half-century when he'd gone by Ricky, which had always caused the Doctor some amusement, though he never explained why.

Another wave of pain hit him, making him spasm. Amanda and Richard moved forward. He shook his head and they stopped.

None of this was right, was it? He'd imagined plenty of times what his death would be like, but he'd never dared try to find out. It was perhaps the only thing he'd made himself wait to discover. So much of his life was spent in impatience, moving from one thing to the next, never pausing to wait to watch as things ran their course.

That had changed after the TARDIS had died. He could remember that now, as clearly as if it had happened a day ago. His beautiful ship, his wonderful friend, who'd had more life in her than he'd ever had. She'd been old when he'd bonded with her, and yet, she'd possessed the willpower to outlive any other Type 40 TARDIS by hundreds of years, simply because a young, cocky, naive Time Lord had wanted to explore the universe and had wanted her to explore it with him.

She'd survived for as long as was possible and a little more besides until one fateful day at one of the human colonies on Mars in the thirty-seventh century. She just shut down. He'd noticed she'd hadn't been running as smoothly as she used to, but it still came as a shock when she was finally gone. He'd never dared to imagine a life without his ship. It had always seemed impossible.

It took him decades to overcome the broken bond with his timeship, and then…then, he'd started a new life, a life where he was forced to stick around and observe, and more and more participate in, the minutiae of everyday life. He hadn't minded it as much as he'd always thought he would, perhaps because he'd been ready for a change. He'd had the best life of any sentient being in the universe, and it was fitting that he was given the chance to see what life was like for most everyone else.

Richard and Amanda had walked the slow path for much longer than he ever had. Before the TARDIS died, both Immortals had traveled with him frequently over the centuries, at the same time and not. Every few decades, he'd stop by and say hi, and one of them would end up coming with him. They never stayed for very long. Immortals, in his experience, always did have a certain wanderlust, but they preferred to wander on their own terms and to take their time doing it. He hadn't really understood that sort of lifestyle until he'd had to take it up himself.

"Doctor, I'm so sorry." Amanda had tears in her eyes. "If we'd been more careful, none of this would have happened."

He shook his head again. "Not your fault. Don't even think about it. It's not what I…I didn't think it would happen like this, but…it's not so bad. Not really."

Richard snorted.

"I'm-I'm serious." He recalled all the other times he'd nearly died and wondered which was worse. "Regenerating in a morgue is much more…unpleasant…"

That particular regeneration had been caused by humans, as well, humans shooting each other in an alley and a human doctor who gave him anesthesia that his alien physiology couldn't handle. He'd been able to forgive them, then…how silly of him to just shrug something like that off. He should have stayed clear of the planet after that, if only the individuals who didn't act like stupid apes didn't keep him tied to Earth in a way he was never connected to Gallifrey.

__

Oh, Rose…

A high-pitched wine came from nowhere. The bridge shook. The Doctor cried out as debris rolled onto his sides.

Amandaheld onto the back of the chair as she got to her feet. **"Phase pistols**. Shit!"

Richard hastily shifted the debris off of the Doctor's body. "They found us," he said. "Disintegration beams won't work on a transport hull, so they'll have to burn their way through. It'll be a while before they can get to us."

The phase pistol was fired at frequent intervals. Each time it was fired, the entire room shook as if caught in an earthquake. Dusk rained down on them, making them cough.

Images swam in front of the Doctor's eyes. He began a particularly strong Gallifreyan curse from the pain before his breath caught in his throat.

Amanda and Richard would be returned to the lab. He was certain of it. Two Immortal subjects were too valuable to kill, even after the trouble the subjects in question had given the UCN. It would probably be a different lab since they'd blown up the last one. The new lab would have increased security. The experiments might be harsher and hastier, too, for fear that their subjects would escape again before they could complete their studies.

Instead of getting them to safety, he'd doomed them to a worse fate. There had to be a way to get them out of this. He just needed to think. "Conglomerate transports always…" He closed his eyes and sucked in a breath. "…always have…secondary laser systems. If you can cannibalize them…make them…portable…you stand a chance."

The ship rocked again, and he bit down hard on his tongue.

"Don't worry about us," Richard said. "It's been three weeks. The SOS we sent is bound to have reached Mac by now. He'll work with the Watchers, organize a rescue. We'll be fine."

They wouldn't be fine. He knew that. There was no telling what would happen to them in the meantime, as soon as the UCN got hold of them and until the rescue attempt was made. He had to hope for the best. He had to believe Richard's reassurances.

His friends became blurred figures. The pain slowly drifted away. He didn't want to die, but as dying went, this wasn't that bad, really. He was with his friends. He'd gone down fighting, too.

Gallifreyans didn't believe in an afterlife. The closest he and his people had ever come to one was the Matrix, which copied and stored a Gallifreyan's consciousness moments before his or her death. The Matrix had been destroyed in the Time War. There was nowhere in which his mind could seek refuge. He wondered if this was it for him.

It was time for him to set out on his final adventure. He'd always wondered what it would be like on the other side.

"Be careful," he said, though he wasn't sure if he was heard. "Burn my body…please…"

The Doctor may have felt a hand squeeze his shoulder, but he was already sinking into the only world he knew nothing about. He closed his eyes.

He waited.


End file.
